One year after the Unexpected Journey began, here is the Unexpected Detour. The second leg of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, is mostly stalling for time: two or three truly great sequences tangled up in long beards and longer pit-stops.

There is, in short, an awful lot of Desolation to wade through before we arrive, weary and panting, on Smaug’s rocky porch. But that was always going to be the drawback of spinning out a 276-page children’s story into more than eight hours of blockbuster movie, particularly when the director is keener to build a prequel trilogy to his own operatic Lord of the Rings films than do justice to Tolkien’s original playful, uncluttered vision.

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The tone is one hundred percent Jackson – a kind of thundering gloominess, cut with the occasional glint of Discworld mischief. Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have decapitated bodies twitching on the ground, and a captured dwarf leering at a female elf: “Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers.” Maybe this really is what a lot of people want to see from a film version of The Hobbit, but let’s at least accept that Tolkien would probably not have been among them.

But he might have at least been impressed by the way that Middle Earth itself has been recreated – and in that respect, Jackson’s film is unimpeachable. From the outset, when Gandalf (Ian McKellen) sends Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and the dwarves continuing on their way towards the Lonely Mountain, the world of the film is rendered in hyper-vivid detail. As the party tangles with hostile wood-elves and hungry giant spiders, the forest gives way to a wide and glassy lake, on which the town of Esgaroth bobs like a clump of algae, and you can almost taste the air change as Smaug the dragon’s treasure-hoard draws ever closer.

The pack of orcs that were hunting Bilbo in the last Hobbit film are still on his tail: one of Jackson’s main innovations in adapting Tolkien’s book was to change a quest story into a chase one. It’s no less of a gimmick this time, but it also allows for The Desolation of Smaug’s best scene, when Bilbo and the dwarves float out of the wood-elves’ dungeon in empty barrels and sail off down the river. Suddenly, the orc hunting party springs from the bushes and the escape becomes a skirmish at 40 miles an hour, like whitewater rafting crossed with a Legend of Zelda video game.

It even begins beautifully, with a too-rare bit of comic business from Freeman, whom you can’t help feel has more to offer the part of Bilbo than the film is prepared to give him room for. After sending the dwarves’ barrels hurtling downstream, he looks at the trapdoor in confusion and tries to open it by stamping his foot, like Oliver Hardy in Block-Heads treading on the pressure pad that opens his garage door, before it finally gives way.

If only more of The Desolation of Smaug rattled along with that same energy and lightness of touch. Instead: mopey conversations and bloodthirsty fight scenes, most of which are extrapolated from a line or two in Tolkien’s original book or invented from scratch. The climactic battle with Smaug himself, who is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, involves a very complicated scheme where Bilbo and the dwarves smelt a lot of metal ore to no obvious purpose.

There is also an extended cameo for Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, with jokes foreshadowing his Lord of the Rings role, and the creation of a new, female elf warrior called Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), whose main purpose is to be the third leg in an inter-species love triangle. Will she end up with the dishy elf or the hunky dwarf? Regrettably, Tolkien scholars must wait another 12 months to find out.